Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti upgrade path leaked with GPU subscription club

Club GeForce Elite is coming, and Nvidia may also offer a tempting upgrade path for GTX 980 Ti owners

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Nvidia is readying a Club GeForce Elite subscription membership with a multitude of benefits, a job ad on LinkedIn has revealed – and it also mentions a potential upgrade offer for the GTX 1080 Ti, confirming the existence of the incoming graphics card.

The LinkedIn listing for the job (a senior marketing manager post) has now been removed, unsurprisingly given the details it spilled, but Club GeForce Elite will reportedly cost subscribers $10 per month (around £8, AU$14) and obviously it will boast considerable perks beyond Nvidia’s normal rewards for GeForce Experience users (like codes for betas or skins).

Members will get access to a bundle of free games, up to four of them, with different titles being rotated on a quarterly basis – giving you time to finish them hopefully (in the case of games which have an end, of course).

The ad also mentions things like further exclusive skins and in-game items of one sort or another, and intriguingly a free ‘GeForce PC in the cloud’ subscription, although it’s not clear what this refers to at the moment (perhaps GeForce Now? – clearly it’s some streaming games scheme).

GTX 980 Ti owners, listen up

In the job listing, Nvidia also talks about reward codes for free games being given to those who report bugs in the firm’s software, and it then mentions that those who own a GeForce 980 Ti will get first place in line for an upgrade to the 1080 Ti.

Either that, or 980 Ti folks will get a ‘step up’ offer, which is presumably some kind of discount on upgrading to the 1080 version of the card. Fingers crossed that’s the case.

As to when we will see that 1080 Ti, Nvidia is expected to unveil the beast at CES, which takes place at the start of next month. Rumored specs include a base clock of 1503MHz (with boost to 1623MHz) and 3,328 CUDA cores, with 10GB of video RAM on board (as opposed to 12GB on the Titan, which has 3,584 CUDA cores).

Of course, the launch is one thing, and the card actually being available to buy is another – we’ll likely have to wait until the spring for it to be on shelves, or possibly longer than that.